Last week I had the pleasure to speak with CO of the Unitarians, Liz Slade. We had a great chat and what came shining through (as it keeps on doing the more I speak to people about this) is the gentle power of jam to connect and unite people and the earth on a radical level. Here is our conversation:
Me: What is it about Unitarianism that makes a project like Jam and Jam unique?
Liz: We welcome people. Unitarianism is very much that the church is shaped by the needs of the people who are a part of it. So we’re not saying ‘hello, what we do in our church is over here and it’s all clearly laid out and these are our traditions and these are our rituals and these are the boundaries of it and if it’s something outside of that than you can’t do it.’ What I see is that we create spaces that allow the expression of people’s creativity and I’m coming to see how that creative expression is what some people might describe as holy or divine or sacred or a spark of life or…there’s lots of different ways of describing it, some of which people might use religious language. That free expression in community is something that Unitarianism offers.
Me: Are you a jam eater?
I’m a part-time jam eater. I wouldn’t say I was a jam aficionado. I’d even say that marmalade is the one food that I cannot stand.
Me: Yeah marmalade is very divisive!
Liz: I don’t know. I’m very anti-marmalade. I wish that I liked it. I know a lot of people that really enjoy the making of marmalade but to me it’s revolting.
Me: Have you made jam before?
Liz: I’ve made jam once, but I’ve helped my mum make jam many times. I feel like I would like more jam in my life, but I don’t feel like I have the necessary large saucepan or patience. But in my former life when I was very disgruntled, I just wanted to quit my job and just make jam because I just felt the freedom of a quiet life is expressed in jam-making!
Me: Oh there’s a lot in that! That’s basically what I did this summer. I was very lucky to be able to quit my job and have the summer off before I started my MA and one of the things I did was make jam. You mentioned about how you wanted more jam making in your life and it’s something that you did with your mum. Do you know what it is, what is that quality of jam-making that makes you think ‘oh I’d like to do more if that?’ Is it nostalgia, is it…you mentioned the freedom to have a quiet life?
Liz: So much of our society is pushing us away from the richness of the domestic. I think for me it’s very clear that you make jam from things that you’ve picked from the wild and from your garden. I guess some people make jam with fruit they’ve bought but for me that’s not it. So for me there’s something about the blackberry picking… so my mum’s classic jam would be a blackberry and apple jelly, and it would be blackberries from the countryside and apples from the garden. We’re pushed towards convenience, but we’re missing so much if we’re only in the transactional space of jam acquisition. And I think that jam is a really good example of how common that is in so many elements of our lives, where the work of home-making is kind of squeezed into the gaps. I think it’s something that deserves a lot more honour than it currently gets in our society. So I guess the longing for spending more time making jam is honouring the richness of that domestic leisure and knowing that you get much more out of it than a jar of jam.
Me: That’s definitely one of my goals for Jam and Jam – what do we get out of it around the sides that’s not just the jam? The jam is obviously a brilliant product that is also edible, it’s something that people will be able to take home with them and be like oh look this is the jam I made! But it’s also about going out and learning to see your local environment in a different day, learning to look, anticipation, knowing or realising that actually I can recognise a lot more plants that I thought I did. I’m not an amazing forager but something that Clare Qualmann mentioned was that actually people really do know how to recognise blackberries and apples and plums and people think they don’t know much about foraging because it seems like such a niche specialised skill, but actually they know so much more than they thought. And the fun in making something with people as well. That’s what’s important to me about it, and using the literal geographical space of the meeting house I guess to help facilitate connections and also the fact that that comes within Unitarianism.
Liz: I don’t have an arts background, but the more I speak to theatre people the more I see the crossover with church, with creating those spaces where people can express and listen and feel and be in different ways of being, and I’m really interested in how we create those spaces together, even on very small scales. I don’t think it has to be cathedral-sized for it to be impactful. I think it can be very small gatherings of a handful of people as long as it’s well facilitated. I think it’s creating spaces to invite in the parts of people that might not have an opportunity to be expressed otherwise or elsewhere.
Me: That’s definitely what the project is about for me, and learning how I can do that in different contexts and on different scales is definitely what I’m figuring out this year. So it’s really exciting, and I just feel really lucky that I get to explore that through jam, because jam’s just something that I enjoy making. And it just seems to have transpired that it’s all just slotted in beautifully this year.
Me: One of the questions that I roughly scribbled down here to ask you is: Do you think there’s anything that jam and jam can achieve that it wouldn’t elsewhere?
Liz: I think there is something about church gatherings that is making the spiritual explicit, it’s showing up those deeper layers of being and saying ‘they are here, we’re not just operating on this superficial, physical, transactional way of being in the world’, and yes the physicality of jam making and the taste of jam making and the physically being with each other is part of it, but it’s in the emotional and spiritual deeper depths and higher heights that we’re explicitly acknowledging. And I think that’s really something that we as Unitarians can offer because it’s allowing people to bring their own understanding to it, so what I love about the simplicity of the jam invitation is that it can be a bit overwhelming if you’re just being invited into a spiritual space without a context because it’s easy to be suspicious of it, or feel like there’s more pressing things to do or be slightly daunted by it or something like that, but I think having the simple invitation of ‘we’re just going to do this thing together’ feels really important. And I also really like the idea that the universality of jam means that I hope that there’ll be people who’ll be drawn to take part in this project who may never dream of setting foot in the meeting house otherwise because they’re like ‘oh I don’t really know what Unitarianism is, it sounds like a cult, I don’t do church’ you know! There’s so many barriers that people have to joining something. Even in a secular community it can be like ‘oh I don’t know who’s going to be there, they’re probably a bit weird’. There’s lots of reasons to be fearful. But if it’s like, ‘oh I’m just going to go along learn how to make jam out of flower petals’ then it’s a very safe invitation. That’s something that I’m really interested in with the Unitarian movement overall is looking at how we can be more welcoming, and it’s not just carrying on doing things the way we’ve always been doing them, it’s finding other ways to reach out and knowing that a lot of people are very wary of faith groups. It’s about showing that there’s many things that we can offer and it needs to be a gentle invitation, because otherwise it’s too much for people who haven’t had faith in their lives. So jam seems like a very welcoming invitation to people!
Me: Yeah. The gentle radical power of jam.
Liz: There’s also something that feels really important to me that the stories of jam are not the stories of power. Everyone has a story of jam, and I think that’s part of the wrong turns that humanity takes is paying too much attention to the stories of power and not enough attention to the stories of jam. I can call to mind so clearly my mum’s finger pushing the jam on the plate to see if it wrinkles when it’s ready. And those actions that you learn person to person are such a powerful cultural substrate but it isn’t one that’s told in the history books! And just as David Attenborough has taught us to love wild animals, I think that jam making can teach us to love hedgerows and having that personal relationship with the natural world in that very personal way that you don’t get when you buy a jar of jam from the supermarket. It seems like those personal relationships are really important for us to be motivated to take care of the natural word. And I think that’s important in a local sense as well as a global one.
One for the Cupboard 